WASHINGTON D.C. —  A Muslim mayor in New Jersey was blocked from attending a belated Eid al-Fitr celebration hosted by President Biden.

The White House held an Eid al-Fitr event to celebrate the end of the Muslim holly month of Ramadan on Monday, May 1, where President Biden addressed the invited guests.

The mayor of Prospect Park, New Jersey, Mohamed Khairullah, who was invited and cleared by the White House, was blocked by the U.S. Secret Service from attending the event.  Khairullah is the longest serving Muslim mayor in this country.

Khairullah said he’d received a call from the White House informing him that he could not attend as he had not been cleared to enter, according to AP News.

President Biden speaks at the Eid al-Fitr dinner at White House

He also said that he was unaware why he was not cleared to enter as the White House official did not give him an explanation.

Khairullah told NPR’s Leila Fadel on Morning Edition that he contacted the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) shortly after he was disinvited to the event. The council informed him that he was on a “secret list”, which was leaked earlier this year.

“I was added to the list in 2019, which put things together in my mind because all my traveling difficulties started in 2019,” Khairullah said. “So it’s at this point, for some reason, I am on a secret list that the government is denying exists and it’s caused me and my family trouble.”

At a White House press briefing this week, when asked about Khairullah being uninvited from the event, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre repeatedly deferred to the U.S. Secret Service.

According to official reports, CAIR has called on the Biden administration to stop the FBI’s distribution of information stored in the Terrorist Screening Data Set. This screening tool holds thousands of individuals’ names. A person with Khairullah’s name and birth date was one of the thousands of individuals in the data set and the New Jersey chapter of CAIR said that CAIR attorneys acquired that information in 2019, according to the Associated Press.

The New Jersey mayor has actively criticized former President Trump’s travel ban that restricted and limited individuals from various Muslim countries from entering the United States. The Associated Press also reported that he has taken trips to Syria and Bangladesh for humanitarian work, partnering with the Syrian American Medical Society and the Watan Foundation.

“It left me baffled, shocked and disappointed,” Khairullah said in an interview with the Associated Press. “It’s not a matter of I didn’t get to go to a party. It’s why I did not go. And it’s a list that has targeted me because of my identity. And I don’t think the highest office in the United States should be down with such profiling.”

For its part, the Secret Service put out a statement from spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi: “While we regret any inconvenience this may have caused, the mayor was not allowed to enter the White House complex this evening. Unfortunately we are not able to comment further on the specific protective means and methods used to conduct our security operations at the White House.”

On how being on the watch list has affected him

Khairullah told Fadel that “the first time I started experiencing difficulties was when we were going on a trip to Istanbul, which we didn’t think [much] about. But when we returned from Istanbul, at JFK, the agents were there at the door and they still said, ‘Oh, you are being randomly selected.'”

Khairullah said that he went with agents and he had to end the conversation, because the agent flat out asked him, “‘Did you meet any terrorists?’ As if the answer was going to be yes or no, to which I said, ‘listen, at this point I’m ending this conversation, I need a lawyer,'” he said.

“And obviously because of that, he said, ‘Do you understand? I’m going to take your phone. We’re going to strip search you.’ So, I’m like, do what you got to do, but this conversation is over.”

On what it’s like to be selected for a search at U.S. airports

Khairullah described to NPR how it feels to be searched at U.S. airports.

“It’s humiliating, to say the least,” he said. “I mean, I could tell you when I was coming back from Canada in 2021, I was detained and placed in a glass room and my toddler daughter would stand at the door asking me why she can’t be with me. And I’m being held there for about two or three hours. There’s no explanation. And how do you explain to a child that your government is detaining your dad for reasons that he can’t explain, that the government won’t explain? It’s just baffling. It’s in a country where we have institutions and we have a great constitution that protects the liberties of people to be targeted because of my name, ethnicity and religion is just unbelievable. And that’s basically what my crimes are.

“To be 100 percent randomly selected every single time I go to the airport is just not a coincidence,” he added.